While I often despair when I think of how misguided our approach to education is. I see it as being about control, about not making mistakes, about not thinking for your self and most of all - all about not being creative.
I do have hope as I find others who not only see the situation as I do but who are so much more articulate than me in explaining what is going on and what we have to pay attention to.
Via Kathy - Here is the very best summary of what is going on, of what is at stake and where we have to go. Ken Robinson is a mix of Michael Caine, Billy Connolly and his own brilliant self. His speech is a tour de force of how to use humour to talk about important things.
I seldom have the time to watch a video like this - about 15 mins - I was riveted and practically wet myself laughing. But at the end he had got me and the audience with his underlying argument.
In a time when we need to put our full creativity to work to pull us back from the cliff, our education system works powerfully to block innovation and creativity of all sorts.
A few blurbs follow
Technorati Tags: Children, Education, Ken Robinson, Kathy Sierra
A Review from Amazon
"This really is a remarkable book. It does for human resources what Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring did for the environment.
It makes you wonder why we insist on sustaining an education system that is narrow, partial, entirely inappropriate for the 21st century and deeply destructive of human potential when human beings have so much latent creative ability to offer.
"Sometimes a writer has an uncanny knack of sharply focusing something which up until then you had not seen in all its simplicity and brilliance. This book does that but at the next moment it makes connections never before imagined…Even the most obstinately prosaic and safe thinkers will be tempted out of their box by Ken Robinson’s ideas, theories and speculations. What’s more, he writes as he speaks, in a way that, magnetically and compulsively, is simply irresistible" Professor Tim Brighouse, Director of Education, Birmingham
